In 1967, Larry Richardson saw San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge as he headed to Vietnam:

The story began in the dead of night in February 1969, when Larry was on a troop bus on his way to deployment. Jolted awake, he caught a glimpse of one of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The image stuck with the kid from Kansas, who was headed for the exotic world of the Mekong Delta.

"Jungles and swamps. Rice paddies," he said. "The Golden Gate Bridge was one of the last major things I saw from the states for a long time. It was home, you know."

He never forgot that moment or what the bridge meant to him. So, decades later, Richardson decided to build a model on his farm in Mulvane, Kansas:

Although Richardson, 63, says he built his bridge on his farm on a whim, this is no coffee-table model. It is 150 feet long and wide enough to fit an automobile. He used 97 1/2 tons of concrete, which he hand-mixed in a wheelbarrow. Progress was slow because he kept wearing out the hoes he used to turn the mixture. [...]

In all, it took 11 years, cost $4,000 and was finished in 2002, making it just 10 years old compared with the Golden Gate's 75.